Seminars and Workshops

Trauma and PTSD — Beyond the Nervous System

Presented by Dr. Iman Dadras, LMFT & Tigran Vardanyan, LMFT

What if trauma cannot be fully understood through the nervous system alone?

This presentation offers a critical exploration of trauma and PTSD beyond contemporary models that primarily locate trauma in the brain, body, or nervous system. Drawing from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, systemic theory, critical theory, and political thought, we will question some of the dominant assumptions shaping contemporary understandings of trauma.

We will examine the idea that trauma is a universal or transcultural phenomenon, and question whether the meaning and effects of traumatic experiences can be understood independently of culture, history, relationships, and social context. We will also challenge the tendency to focus on the traumatic event itself, rather than on the subject’s psychic reality—the meanings, fantasies, conflicts, desires, relationships, and histories through which an experience becomes psychologically significant.

From this perspective, trauma cannot be reduced to what happened to the body or nervous system. It also raises questions about language, subjectivity, power, politics, and the social conditions in which suffering takes shape.

Together, we will explore what becomes possible when we move beyond the nervous system and beyond the event to consider the complex psychic and social realities of human suffering.